Openbox pipemenu to control virtual machines of VirtualBox

25. Oktober 2011, 2 Comments, Tags: , .

Openbox, Virtualbox… Coincidence? I don’t know. Anyway, I am a huge fan of VirtualBox, for the virtual machines are extremely fast, stable and nice to control. With the command line tool VBoxManage comes a nice tool for all those CLI-lovers out there. You can literally do anything with it, what the GUI can do. (at least it looks like that)

Now, starting the GUI to start a VM is a bit slow, so VBoxManage startvm "vm" is a huge time- and memorysaver.
Since I work with Openbox, the natural thing for me was to google for a suitable pipemenu. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one. Long story short: Here is my self-written Openbox pipemenu to control VirtualBox’s VMs. (It can start and stop them, at least.)
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My new emacs setup (no .emacs here, don’t worry)

23. Oktober 2011, 2 Comments, Tags: , .

After having used emacs for a couple of months now, I discovered the emacs --daemon option today and was astonished. Having quite a big emacs config, it takes ages for emacs to start preventing me from using it as the standard editor for config files etc. The --daemon mode starts emacs in the background acting as a server and allows one to create emacs frames using the emacsclient in various ways. EMacs shows up lightning-fast then and becomes an option for the always-to-use text editor.


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How to make ReMoot work with mpd

31. Mai 2011, 0 Comments, Tags: , .

Heya, I was struggling with ReMoot commands not having effect on the MPD (music player daemon), which is a nifty tool I discovered yesterday. Anyway, even though ReMoot lists this software as supported on it’s website, nothing happened when I executed “remoot playpause” or something like that.

The reason is that ReMoot only looks for programs that belong to the current user, while the mpd most of the times has it’s own user. (At least that is what’s proposed for example here)

To get ReMoot running with mpd you have to do the following two things:

  • ReMoot uses mpc to interface with mpd, so make sure it is installed!
  • edit /usr/bin/daemoot (or whereever it may be) and change line 470 (version 0.9 of ReMoot) to my @apps = `ps -L -u $ENV{USER},mpd -o comm,lwp`; where, of course, mpd has to be the user the mpd runs under.

That should be it. Have fun!

Hide the ugly status bar in Pidgin

25. Mai 2011, 0 Comments, Tags: , .

Hello together, a short summary what happened since the last blog entry and led me to the creation of a small Pidgin plugin.

  • I switched to linux
  • I decided to use Pidgin instant messanger
  • I hated the big, fat, ugly status bar in pidgin
  • I wasn’t able to find a plugin that hides it (and does nothing more)
  • So I wrote my own

It is just for Unix (I guess..) and you have to build it yourself. A small README is included in the tarball.

Sourcecode hidestatusbar.tar

I hope it helps anybody.

All the best, Oli

Integrate Doctrine 2.0.1 with Zend Framework 1.11.3

19. Februar 2011, 51 Comments, Tags: , , , .

Hello readers! The most frequently visited and linked article on my blog is by far the tutorial, how to integrate Doctrine 2 with Zend Framework 1.09. However – it is written in german and since I published it, a couple of new versions of both libraries were released. So I decided to rewrite it in english and adjust it so that it fits the most up-to-date versions of both Doctrine and the Zend Framework.

I will presume you know more or less exactly what these software packages do, and how to use them. Also, I assume that you are able to set up a virtual host by yourself. You should be familiar with how to use a command line, too!
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